Organic light emitting devices (OLEDs), which make use of thin film materials that emit light when excited by electric current, are expected to become an increasingly popular form of flat panel display technology. This is because OLEDs have a wide variety of potential applications, including cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), computer displays, informational displays in vehicles, television monitors, as well as light sources for general illumination. Due to their bright colors, wide viewing angle, compatibility with full motion video, broad temperature ranges, thin and conformable form factor, low power requirements and the potential for low cost manufacturing processes, OLEDs are seen as a future replacement technology for cathode ray tubes (CRTs) and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which currently dominate the growing $40 billion annual electronic display market. Due to their high luminous efficiencies, electrophosphorescent OLEDs are seen as having the potential to replace incandescent, and perhaps even fluorescent, lamps for certain types of applications.
Successful utilization of phosphorescence holds enormous promise for organic electroluminescent devices. For example, an advantage of phosphorescence is that all excitons (formed by the recombination of holes and electrons in an EL), which are formed either as a singlet or triplet excited state, may participate in luminescence. This is because the lowest singlet excited state of an organic molecule is typically at a slightly higher energy than the lowest triplet excited state. This means that, for typical phosphorescent organometallic compounds, the lowest singlet excited state may rapidly decay to the lowest triplet excited state from which the phosphorescence is produced. In contrast, only a small percentage (about 25%) of excitons in fluorescent devices are believed to be capable of producing the fluorescent luminescence that is obtained from a singlet excited state. The remaining excitons in a fluorescent device, which are produced in the lowest triplet excited state of an organic molecule, are typically not capable of being converted into the energetically unfavorable higher singlet excited states from which the fluorescence is produced. This energy, thus, becomes lost to radiationless decay processes that only tend to heat-up the device.
As a consequence, since the discovery that phosphorescent materials can be used as the emissive material in highly efficient OLEDs, there is now much interest in finding still more efficient electrophosphorescent materials and OLED structures containing such materials.
High efficiency organic light emitting devices (OLEDs) using the phosphorescent dopant, fac tris(2-phenylpyridine)iridium (Ir(ppy)3), have been demonstrated using several different conducting host materials. M. A. Baldo et al., Nature, vol. 395, 151 (1998); D. F. O'Brien et al., Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 74, 442 (1999); M. A. Baldo et al., Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 75, 4 (1999); T. Tsutsui et al., Japanese. J. Appl. Phys., Part 2, vol. 38, L1502 (1999); C. Adachi et al., Appl. Phys. Let., vol. 77, 904 (2000); M. J. Yang et al., Japanese J. Appl. Phys., Part 2, vol. 39, L828 (2000); and C. L. Lee et al., Appl. Phys. Left., vol. 77, 2280 (2000). Since the triplet level of the metal-ligand charge transfer state of the green-emitting Ir(ppy)3 is between 2.5 eV and 3.0 eV, deep blue fluorophores with a peak wavelength at about 400 nm, such as 4,4′-N,N′-dicarbazole-biphenyl (CBP), are likely candidates as triplet energy transfer and exciton confining media. Using 6% to 10%-Ir(ppy)3 in CBP leads to efficient Ir(ppy)3 phosphorescence. In addition to the energetic resonance between the dopant and the host, the control of charge carrier injection and transport in the host layers is believed to be necessary for achieving efficient formation of radiative excitons. High electrophosphorescence efficiency has been achieved using Ir(ppy)3 doped into CBP along with a 2,9-dimethyl-4,7-diphenyl-phenanthroline (BCP) electron transport and exciton blocking layer. M. A. Baldo et al., Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 75, 4 (1999). In that device, the doped CBP layer was found to readily transport holes.
Current materials used in phosphorescent OLEDs may be used to form devices with internal quantum efficiencies of near 100%. However, the materials used to form the hole transporting, recombination and blocking layers in these conventional devices tend to have triplet energies corresponding to emission in the green part of the visible spectrum. If a dopant capable of producing blue phosphorescence is inserted in such a device utilizing the existing materials and structures, the emission will only come, if at all, inefficiently from the matrix material, and not from the phosphorescent dopant material. Accordingly, there is great interest in finding efficient OLED structures that can emit in the blue region of the visible electromagnetic spectrum.